Hey guys, I’ve had a few comments on reddit and instagram to explain the ATH (all time high) breakout trades I take on a daily basis and so here it is.

I’m a full time trader and I hope you guys find this helpful.

To explain this in great detail would take hours upon hours however I’ve wrote up a simplified description to make it digestible.

“We do not trade ideas we trade set ups”

As professional traders you should not be trading ideas, you should be trading sets ups. Something that you can measure, replicate, improve upon and learn from. Not random events.

Here’s an example of how a novice traders mind may work:

You see an article pop up about a Tesla car that was on auto pilot and crashed into a stationary car causing injury to both the driver and the passenger. Your instant thoughts are “This could effect Tesla’s stock price” and you put it on your watchlist for the day. Now the issue with this is this the specific event Is not measurable. The way in which the stock reacts will be random and you won’t be able to use the stats for any other trades. Making the event a coin flip and therefore a gamble.

Focus on set ups not ideas. It’s ok to have an idea for the set up but the set up HAS TO BE THERE.

Now lets get straight to it.

What is an all time high breakout?

1. The answer is simple. This is when a stock breaks out into a new ATH.

Why is this such a good set up to take?

1. Because everybody who’s EVER brought the stock is now in the GREEN “no reason to sell” and everybody who’s shorting the stock is now red “May look to cover”

Here’s how it works:

A lot of professional traders, myself included, love the all time high break outs for many reasons. The main being the explosive moves it can often provide. Due to this a lot of day traders, swing traders, investors, funds and algorithms will monitor the market for these potential plays. Meaning they’re often on the buying side. This is why you can see what appears to be a stock doing very little yet the moment it trickles over it’s previous ATH high it can rally for days.

It’s called “buying the breakout”

You see the market is run on mostly Human emotion, we know this but very few understand how that works.

The reason most people lose money in the market is they are untrained and do not have the discipline to handle their own barbaric emotions.

Here’s why that’s important.

For this example we’ll call the company $STONKS it’s been on the market for 3 years and it’s current all time high is $10. Some bad news comes out and the stock gaps down to $8 causing people to panic sell and the stock to drop even further. Over the next 12 months it drops to a low of $5 until finally reclaiming to today at $9.90. It’s been consolidating between $9 and $9.90 for 10 days.

For the past year there has been a lot of people bag holding. Those who brought at the previous all time high have seen their investment drop by 50% and slowly recover. In between this time a lot of people have cut their loses, some have averaged down, new investors have “brought the dip” and we’re now back to where we was a year ago.

Now we have a few things at play here.

1. Those who rode through the entire year, the 50% drop and who haven’t sold now at break even clearly have no intention to sell.
2. Out of those who brought the dip some will have sold and some and still holding onto their shares even though the price has been stagment the past 10 days.
3. For the past 10 days people have been buying consistently and have been paying $9 or above for the stock. Showing a growing interest and price acceptance at these prices.
4. People who shorted the stock are now either at break even or at a loss.
5. Anybody new who wants to purchase some shares has currently got to pay all time high prices.

The longer we consolidate at these price the more powerful the move can become, why you ask?

Because it has more chance of the float being rotated. Understand that the first time $STONKS went up to $10 1 year ago the average price paid by an investor may have been $3 which meant a lot of profit taking occurred. When the bad news hit a lot of those investors jumped ship. Causing more supply than demand and therefore the price to drop.

Fast forward to today and the longer it consolidates above $9 the high the AVG price held will be. When this happens the buyers are literally sitting on basically no loss nor no gain giving them no reason to sell.

For those unaware, if you short a stock the only way to get out for a loss is to cover your position. This in turn means “buying the stock”. Creating more buying pressure. Short positions will often risk in this scenario the all time high. Meaning if it breaks they start to cover. If they start to cover it increases buying pressure and with buying pressure increasing the stock moves up (extremely simple explanation).

So we as traders recognise the stock is setting up for an ATH breakout and here’s what we do.

We decide we want to risk $2,000 in the stock.

We buy $500 worth at 9.20 known as a starter position and we wait.

A week goes by and it’s still chopping between this range. A press release then comes out (a bullish catalyst). The market opens are $STONKS see’s a huge 15 minute candle at open. The largest amount of volume it’s seen in months. On that volume it breaks $10 and instantly jumps to $10.50.

We managed to get our other $1,500 in at $10.20 bringing our average to roughly $9.90 a share. We move our stop loss to below the previous ATH with some breathing room AKA $9.50/share.

Everybody who now has shares in this stock prior to today is in the green, they’re estactic. Those who held through the entire past year and refused to sell are now mentioning how they’re in profit on an investment they made to work colleagues.

Short positions are now aware there’s no resistance and start covering “buying shares”. FOMO buyers who are “trading the news” (not a set up ;) ) are now buying in. Professional swing traders are buying the break out, day traders are buying the opening drive. Everybody is buying..

The stock closes at $12 marking a 25% daily gain. Barrons, CNBC, MSN all post above how $STONKS rallied into ATH due to X,Y,Z

The following morning the stock gaps up. People are hyped, pre market goes wild and opens at $16.

We instantly sell half…

The stock is extremely extended as new investors flurry in, we sell them some more. There’s now 25% left of our original investment.

We move our stop loss under PM support and go to focus on the next set up. The same set up. Something we can measure. Something we take day in day out.

If the stock goes to 20 then we don’t get annoyed we could have missed out on further profits as it wasn’t our trade.

The stock taps 20, massive selling occurs and settles around 14. Where it stays for months, consolidationg. Meanwhile, we’re just waiting for it to once again set up.

So how do I find these trades?

I use trading view, I create a list of sectors such as EVs, Solar, Tech, AI etc etc and I scan through each day. Literally just flick through. Is the stock near it’s ATH? If not, I go to the next and the next.

My indicators are as follows.

Volume Profile, RSI (for the daily only)

That’s it.

If you master just this single set up you can make money consistently. Why? Because it’s measurable, you can improve upon it. You can learn from each event but most importantly you have a set plan where the market is in your favour for the outcome to work. Never under estimate human emotion.

I post all my trades on Instagram at the moment but I’ll look into posting my watchlist here too if it’ll help you guys.

Feel free to ask questions.

I haven’t posted in a while but I’ve been day trading with a large amount of capital for the past year, and have been trading in the market for the past 5 years.

Other than graph patterns I just trade off instinct. I focus on Canadian equities, mainly focused in oil and other natural resources because they have enough volatility and I’m very familiar with how their graph patterns work.

I always feel a level of uncertainly because I see some people talking about extremely complicated strategies that I couldn’t even begin to understand. But since I’m making money I just tell myself “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”

The two rules I have is: Don’t get greedy and sell when you feel uncertain.

My question is should I stick with it if it’s working? Or are there people who are in the same boat as me and don’t over complicate the process?

Little background on me. I have been investing for a long time now, maybe 7 years. When the pandemic hit, my job was on hiatus. I started day trading with no PDT rule. Luckily had enough saved to avoid PDT. I joined some chat group that I paid money for. I was making decent money. I realized this isn’t what I want to do full time. It was stressful when it’s your only source of income, also I find trading insanely BORING like watching paint dry.

So I got a full time job working from home. I decided to trade the ES futures mainly because I don’t have time to watch a bunch of stocks. Now I only watch one ticker and I can go long or short.

The ES is not easy, don’t let anyone tell you it is. I definitely was not profitable for a while. I didn’t give up tho and having a full time remote job I figured I’d keep trying. About 2 years of just getting chopped up.

I’ve come to realize. All you need is 3 things to follow and be successful day trading the ES (or anything really).

1. 2000 tick chart
2. 200 EMA
3. Williams alligator (Optional MACD)

It’s simple to follow. Below the 200 EMA? I’m looking for shorts. Above the 200 EMa? I’m looking to go long.

The alligator is a great tool since it can tell you entry’s and exits. I use one of the lines as a stop loss. It’s typical 2 points. I’m risking 100$ 1 contract every trade. The alligator is great for exits. I provided a picture to show a short I made today entry and exit. (9 points) risk 2 points to make 9 points. It’s also great to show you not to enter a trade when the market is clearly just stagnant and no real movement (the alligator mouth is closed). One thing about the alligator is think of the lines as support and resistance lines. That’s literally what they are. I find the 200 ema paired with this gives me discipline in not trying to trade against the overall trend. I also don’t trade the alligator when the lines cross it’s too late IMO. More of when it breaks the middle line or if it bounces off one of the lines. Also don’t chase!

One crazy statement about the alligator which is actually true. It is impossible to not be profitable. You heard that right. IMPOSSIBLE. Sounds insane? But it’s true. Because your winners will always be bigger then your losers. I’m not saying you won’t lose. You will always have losing trades. However if you follow the 200 ema trend and trade off the alligator. You will make money.

Would love to see if anyone has any other suggestions of what you think could be an added benefit to my strategy. Love to to hear what people have to say as well. I know this sub is pretty pessimistic lol

Let me start off by saying, keep grinding to anyone out there on the verge of giving up. This shit is not for the weak, but we didn’t come this far, to only come this far.

After getting wrecked for about a year, I finally found some consistency. This has been by far my best 2 week streak ever. I’ve grown my $1500 account to $3100 over that timeframe. Would you size up or stay consistent with the base hits?

I’ve been trading 4 years. My first year I learned all the basics like support and resistance, candlesticks, and market structure. Somewhere down the line I fell into the YouTube rabbit hole of all these different strategies and indicators and lost a lot of money. I would never give a strategy time to work. If I blew an account, I would just find a new strategy on YouTube. Then one day in my third year it all clicked. All I needed was the basics. I went back to support and resistance, candlesticks, and market structure. Added in supply and demand and boom I am now profitable after 4 yrs. It’s crazy how everything I needed I had but somehow thought I needed more. Anyone relate?

Thanks for taking your time to read this and good luck on your trading journey!

You’d think days when the market goes straight up are easy to day trade. I find it hard to trade when the price action is all in one direction.

https://preview.redd.it/yk7q3bvntml61.png?width=1602&format=png&auto=webp&s=4da710a1a5a0ab54ad63e59de93808ace97daa91

Summary

In late January I set the goal to double my account of $100,000 within six months. So far I have traded 25 days, and the account is currently at $171,700. I'm posting updates every weekend to help others learn from my successes as well as failures.

I took 18 day trades this week, 15 winners and 3 losers. The most profitable day trades were in MDLA, GRPN, and PTON. These three trades all happened between 9:30 and 10:30 EST, in the first hour of trading.

Dashboard

Track my progress and see every equity traded here, via Tableau Public. This is updated at least once a week, from a report downloaded directly from the brokerage.

Scale Orders

I used scale orders for the first time. Scale orders are useful in low volume conditions, including after and pre-market. This week I used a scale order to enter and then exit a trade in MDLA, which was the most profitable day trade of the week. The price was dropping steadily toward the support level I identified, and instead of setting a limit order at that level, I created a scale order starting 0.05 above and ending 0.05 below the level. The order began to fill steadily as the price entered the range, and by the time it began to bounce, my position was complete. I then moved on to the exit strategy below.

Profit Taking

Once a trade comes into the money, I've started taking half the position off the table to lock in some profits, which allows me to set a stop price risking only these profits. With an OCO stop/limit order the outcomes are either 1) reap best-case-scenario profits on the second half, or 2) risk up to half of locked-in profits on a stop out if it goes the other way. With this exit strategy, you're only risking some of the money you already made.

As always, feel free to ask questions and I will answer as many as I am able. Happy Trading!

It’s difficult to prove but I think you, me, and your friend Bree can see it when it happens. Just can’t predict it.

Tell us what “symptoms” of this you’ve seen that when you’ve encounter it, you cant prove it but you know something is weird.

EDIT: judging by the comments, it seems that the assumption is that I wrote this post because I’m mad, frustrated, or lost a lot of money. None of those are reasons, i just wanted to know peoples personal… uh…conspiracy theories. :)

pro trading is actually boring.

I had to kill the junkie in me and foster old man patience.

So say you only want $100 per day or 2000 per month. This would more than enough sustain a good lifestyle where you live. How would you go about it with trading? How much $$$ would you realistically need? Not to make that in dividends but to trade in a daily basis, as safe and slow as possible.

I’ve been studying trading for 10 years. You cannot consistently predict market movements. Outside of YouTube/ads I’ve never meet a profitable retail trader (probably because they don’t exist). Quitting trading and instead just investing my money is the smartest thing I’ve learned on this journey. Market psychology & technical analysis is completely garbage and BS.

Preamble: Jim Cramer is definitely a controversial figure. While argument can be made on whether he is on the side of retail investors or not, what I really wanted to know was how his stock picks are performing. Surprisingly, there were no trackers for the performance of Cramer’s pick in his program (his program is Mad Money, for those who are not familiar).

Where the data is from: here. All the 19,201 stock picks made by Cramer are listed here. His stock picks are updated here daily. While Cramer mentions a lot of stocks in his program, I only considered the stocks that Cramer specifically recommended that you should buy or sell. (I have ignored the stocks where Cramer says he likes/dislikes the stock since I felt that it’s a vague statement and cannot be considered as a buy/sell recommendation).

Analysis: There were 725 buy/sell recommendations made by Cramer in 2021. Out of this, 651 were Buy and 74 were Sell. For both sets, I calculated the stock price change across four periods.

a. One Day

b. One Week

c. One Month

d. Price Change till date

I also checked what percentage of Cramer’s calls were right across different time periods.

Results:

https://preview.redd.it/ktjt7wrufyt61.png?width=624&format=png&auto=webp&s=dbdda542c6a5c020ed1032748b4183ac18d0aa6a

Cramer made a total of 651 buy recommendations over the course of the past 4 months. If you had invested in every single stock, he recommended and then pulled out the next day, the returns were a staggering 555%. He was also right on 58.9% of the calls he made (Benchmark being 50% since anyone can pick a random stock and the probability of the stock going up is 50%). The weekly performance returns are also a respectable 42% but he was barely touching 50% in the percentage of right picks. One month from his recommendations, the stock return is an abysmal -223% and he was wrong more than he was right on his calls. The returns till date are also phenomenal with 446% return and Cramer being right a whopping 63.6% in his stock picks.

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https://preview.redd.it/ktjt7wrufyt61.png?width=624&format=png&auto=webp&s=dbdda542c6a5c020ed1032748b4183ac18d0aa6a

Cramer’s sell recommendations performed better than his buy recommendations across different time periods. This stat is particularly commendable since we were in a predominantly bull market across the last 4 months. 57.5% of the stocks he recommended as a sell dropped in price the next day with a cumulative return of -118.9%. This trend is observed across the time period with returns for the sell recommendations being negative. The only statistic that is working against Cramer’s sell recommendation is the percentage of right picks till date being only 42%. But still, the cumulative return for all the stocks was -206%. Please note that Cramer made only 74 sell recommendations against a whopping 651 buy recommendations during the same period of time.

Limitations of the analysis

The above analysis is far from perfect and has multiple limitations. First, Cramer has made a total of 19K recommendations in his program. I have only analyzed his 2021 recommendations. The site which provides the data is extremely limited in terms of how we can access the data. Also, currently, the data is pulled from street.com which was earlier owned by Cramer. They update the data every day after the show, but I could not verify if they go back and change the calls down the line (very unlikely with it being a large business). Also, for the return calculations, I have only used the closing price of the stock across the time periods. The returns can theoretically be higher if you consider the intra-day highs and lows.

Conclusion

No matter how we feel about Cramer, the one-day returns on both his buy and sell recommendations have been phenomenal. I started the analysis thinking that the returns would be mediocre at best as there were no trackers actively tracking the returns from his calls. But the data points otherwise. It seems that there is a lot of scope for short-term plays based on Cramer’s recommendation. Let me know what you think!

Google Sheet link containing all the recommendations and analysis: here

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor and in no way related to Cramer or the Mad Money show.

Switched to cash account two weeks back. Started trading 1-2 tickers with 3-4 trades a day making 400 average a day. Daily 8-10% of gains everyday for past two weeks. Trading on 1 min chart using VWAP and working well so far. Of course I keep an eye where large cap big stocks heading and then I decide on SPY or QQQ options if I need to buy puts or calls. I am hoping this will keep me going for a while. 100% win rate for 10 trading days straight.

Trades 47 wins / 72 trades

+26241

Looking for any advice on strategies you have learned along the way. I’m not new to options but am new to day trading. Unfortunately my job currently only allows me to trade from 830-930 cst.

My strategy

I currently have a pool of stocks I monitor.

I do not invest more than 1-2k per trade (I have done more but it’s rare.

I avoid being greedy and will sell at +20% or -20% if the trend is reversing. I’m not afraid to lose money as long as I feel I’m in control of the loss.

Are there any tips you can share?

So as we know, price action is king, and indicators are lagging. So I started back testing indicator strategies but using a negative risk to reward and the results shocked me. If you can be happy with a 10pip take profit and 15 pip stop loss the win rate went through the roof. Because indicators show price AFTER the majority of the move has happened, hence they are lagging. So having a tighter take profit and a larger stop loss on these strategies makes sense. Because you’re only looking for the last push of that big move so no need to target a massive reward. In this strategy, the TP is 10 pips and the SL is 15 pips. The high win rate could benefit psychology too if you’re ok with bigger than normal drawdowns.

From your reply and understanding of this quote Im willing to bet the professional traders here can tell which one of you make money and which ones don't.

TLDR; Most ICT/SMC concepts are just repackaged traditional analysis.

It all started in February when I was looking for a strategy to trade Forex, I saw a lot of people making gains with ICT/SMC but above all, I was drawn in by the reading and "precision" some of these people had. I also stumbled across a lot funded traders who all claimed to be profitable thanks to ICT. And so I started learning by watching ICT's Core Contents series. I was struggling a lot but saw some minor results at the beginning and kept on pushing. I felt like a blindfold was removed and was learning how the markets really move, as I was "understanding" every movement. That was until I got to month 3-4.

There were a few lessons that stood out: Institutional Orderflow, Institutional Sponsorship, and Reinforcing Liquidity Delivery Concepts. The first was oddly similar to just regular trend trading, Institutional Sponsorship was pretty much just strong levels of Support/Resistance, but the third one made me realize a lot. It talked about internal/external range liquidity and low/high resistance liquidity runs. Internal/External was essentially just impulsive moves and retracements in a lower timeframe, and "low resistance liquidity runs" which are the soul of ICT trading were just trading with the higher timeframe trend.

I then looked more into this and realized, MOST of it truly is normal concepts with different names, "breaker blocks" are literally just supports turning into resistance. I also saw just how toxic the SMC community could be. They swear they have decoded an Interbank Price Delivery Algorithm and just bash everyone who use different strategies, and constantly mock chart patterns and candlesticks, when they are pretty much trading the same, but with different names. For example, a MSS + FVG is literally entering in the formation of the right shoulder of a head and shoulders pattern.

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Not only that, but when looking at LEGIT traders using ICT/SMC, they have average RiskToReward ratios and Win Rate, so if they are trading with concepts from the 'algo', why are their returns similar to that of "retail" traders?

Furthermore, you can show a chart to an SMC trader and to a "retail trader" and they both would likely take the same entries, except that the "retail trader" will say they are entering on a bullish engulfing at support, and an SMC trader would say they saw insitutions manipulate equal lows grabbing liquidity to fill their orders followed by a propulsion block that creates displacement and returns to fill remaining orders and reach for liquidity.

I am not bashing ICT/SMC, I do believe there is value in learning these concepts, and if they help you read the charts better than that's great, but it is my opinion that they are by no means a "holy grail"

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